© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org I is widely recognized that land conversion, hunting, forest harvesting, and other human influences are depleting biodiversity. Yet the specific mechanisms through which human activities affect species at particular locations remain poorly characterized. This lack of understanding limits our ability to attribute changes in biodivers...

DNA studies are revealing the extent of hidden, or cryptic, biodiversity. Two new studies challenge paradigms about cryptic biodiversity and highlight the importance of adding a historical and biogeographic dimension to biodiversity research.

As people encroach increasingly on natural areas, one question is how this affects avian biodiversity. The answer to this is partly scale-dependent. At broad scales, human populations and biodiversity concentrate in the same areas and are positively associated, but at local scales people and biodiversity are negatively associated with biodiversity. We investigated whether there is also a system...

Data about biodiversity are either scattered in many databases or reside on paper or other media not amenable to interactive searching. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a framework for facilitating the digitization of biodiversity data and for making interoperable an as-yet-unknown number of biodiversity databases that are distributed around the globe. In concert with othe...

Recognizing the imperiled status of biodiversity and its benefit to human well-being, the world's governments committed in 2010 to take effective and urgent action to halt biodiversity loss through the Convention on Biological Diversity's "Aichi Targets". These targets, and many conservation programs, require monitoring to assess progress toward specific goals. However, comprehensive and easily...

I review the nature of biodiversity as an economic commodity, and discuss the extent to which and mechanisms via which markets can be used to conserve biodiversity. 1 Markets for Biodiversity Biodiversity is being destroyed at a rate which is paralleled only by the rates of destruction in historical episodes such as the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today, however, the driving forces are mainly ...

The concept of ecosystems services provides a robust and complementary rationale for biodiversity conservation to the traditional arguments based on intrinsic value. In principle, it also provides a mechanism for optimizing investments in biodiversity conservation and directing them to where they are most useful. This requires the valuation of ecosystem services, and in particular, the contribu...

human activities often adversely affect natural landscapes and ecosystems. natural landscapes consist of habitats, and habitat loss and fragmentation are major threats to biodiversity. environmental impact assessment (eia)as a systematic and well documented procedure to identify, describe and assess the direct and indirect effects of a developmental project in different environments does not co...

background: lactic acid bacteria play a key role in sourdough fermentation. lactobacilli are the most important group of lactic acid bacteria in sourdough. therefore, the main objective of this study was to identify lactobacillus strains in iranian traditional wheat sourdoughs as a basis for further studies on the technological applications in the production of typical breads. methods: fourteen...

sooty blotch and flyspeck occur on fruit surfaces and result in economic losses due to less attractive appearance. sooty blotch fungi form dark mycelial mats whereas flyspeck fungal agents are well characterized with black, sclerotium-like bodies on fruit surface. whilst more than 60 species have been reported in association with these two fungal diseases, thus far they have not been studied in...